"With great power comes great responsibility."
Been watching a lot of Spider Man lately on tv and this has got me thinking. This only makes sense in my head, but sometimes it feels like life imitating art, mostly because Spider Man was created WAY before I was born and on the stereotypes of a social out cast who is squirming his way through life and taking guff from everyone because he can't stand up for himself yada, yada, yada. Basically me through all of high school. I also tend to use comic book heroes in my analogies of undocumented people because of the obvious dualities we both share. Mostly stuff with having a secret identity, living outside the normal parameters of everyday life, again with the social outcast and a few more other topics that tend to focus more on me personally.
You would think that if I were to identify with comic characters I would gravitate more toward Superman, the Ultimate Illegal Alien or the X-Men, people who have to fight for their right to live from an ignorant and in there case, gene'ophobic society. And I do, but at the end of the day it's Spider Man all the way, the working class hero. Comparisons like this one don't really help things in the long run because it's just fantasy and escape, but it does help filter and guide in the absence of the real thing from friends and family. It's only natural that we all tend to live vicariously through other entities fictional or not. I just do it more with comics because I grew up on them and I have a profound love for them the same way other people love poetry, short stories etc.
With the characters of Spidy and Peter, I gravitate toward the situations they find themselves in and the everyday scenarios that are amplifier through a hero's perspective. Much like Spidy, I have done my own thing and as a result, it has taken me to places I never knew I would be at. Like Spidy, I find myself in the company of great people who have lived and saved the world a million times over, metaphorically speaking. I find myself and accepted in the company of people who are doing great things and are an inspiration to me because at the end of the day, I need real people to look up to, not fake ones.
Much of what draws me to this character is how he deals with the double life, or more like lack thereof. Spidy is a working class hero. I say that because he isn't out saving the universe/world, stopping a mass genocide or anything like that like all the other heroes. He fights purse snatchers, bank robbers and local villains who don't know what they got themselves into. He has always had personal conflict when it came to loved ones because he doesn't want to put them in danger. He doesn't want anyone to know that he loves them because they would be targets for villains. His choice to be Spidy is his own and he doesn't want to let anyone get hurt because of it.
I tend to mirror those feelings because for as long as I can remember, I never had confidence about who I am and because of the undoc issue, I made it worse by focusing on that. I figured that if I was going to live my life like this, that I would have to exclude others from it and deal with it on my own. We both share similar characteristics, coincidentally, and like Spidy, my life is in chaos at times. Since he spends his free time fighting crime and what not, his personal life suffers and he is always trying to make ends meat because he is using his powers responsibly, rather than selfishly. His life would be better off if he wasn't spider man and risked his life, but he knows better. I know better.
I write a lot, and not just here. Here, this is me practicing and writing what I think. It's said that the first 10,000 pages a writer writes are crap, so I'm just writing the crap outta my system. I write a lot another blog and in publications as a reporter. I have learned the fundamental value of what it means to be a reporter, a reporter of the people. Whenever I write, I write because I know that "this" is something that needs to be brought to the attention of the masses. To inform them of what is happening. To tell them a story of something that happened or of someone doing something great. It has never been to make a name for myself and be recognized. All of that came on its own.
Like Spidy, I do what I do because I know that it's a service that needs to be done. A service no one else will do and because I am in the position to do it, I cannot turn my back on it. A sort of self sacrifice to be more succinct. But at what expense ? Like Spidy I find myself in solitude at the end of the day. I live with my family so things are better for me now, but there is still a feeling of emptiness and solitude. It's hard to know what impact you are making when you never really see or in our cases acknowledge their benefit. It's easy to focus on the darkside of things, knowing there are others hurting on deeper levels than you are. We all go through humps and hard days really. It takes one rock to set of the land slide, but we'll recover. Spidy can entertain me till then.
